Today Intel is expanding their LGA1156 platform processor lineup by rolling out new dual-core Clarkdale processors manufactured with 32 nm process. The manufacturer has every intention to make them a true sales hit: they will exist in three different families and the prices of different models will lie in the interval between $84 and $284. What are the real marketing prospects of these new solutions and has Nehalem microarchitecture retained all its charm in the dual-core incarnation. These are the questions we will try answering in our today’s article.

Other Applications

Here Clarkdale falls desperately behind Lynnfield. This is obviously the result of moving the memory controller into a separate semiconductor die. Therefore, you shouldn’t be surprised that Core i5-661 yielded to Core 2 Duo 8500. During data compression Core i5 and Core i3 work at about the same speed as dual-core LGA775 processors. As a result, Pentium G6950 turns out the slowest solution in this entire archiving test.

This time we gave up the traditional PSBench test to check out the image editing speed in Photoshop. Instead we prepared a new benchmark based on enhanced Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test including processing of four 10-megapixel images from a digital camera. Under a workload like that Core i5-661 can compete successfully against quad-core LGA775 and Socket AM3 solutions. Core i3-540 performs as good as the best dual-core CPUs, while Pentium G6950 loses hopelessly to the previous-generation dual-core Intel solutions.

Multi-threading support is not implemented the best way in Mathematica 7 (within a single kernel). Therefore, a standard benchmark sorts out our testing participants in a not very standard way. Nevertheless, different Clarkdale CPUs perform quite up to the mark raising the performance bar in each price range.

In the Folding@Home distributed computing suite Core i5-661 is just a little behind the quad-core CPUs. However, just like Core i3-540, it is undoubtedly faster than all dual-core processors, which is yet another proof of how beneficial Hyper-Threading support could be.